Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, I want to say that we support the Treasury Laws Amendment (Making Sure Multinationals Pay Their Fair Share of Tax in Australia and Other Measures) Bill 2019. Yet I want to identify a huge lack of integrity in the government. This is about building facades for the government. I'm going to later ask the people we represent an important question. Do you remember the people who we're supposed to represent? What happened to fairness? What happened to honesty? What happened to service? Let's go through this bill's three parts. And while we're going through them, just remember that Senator Hanson said that half a per cent of tax revenue in this country is from multinationals, yet they use the assets that people have paid for.

The first provision in this bill is thin capital, requiring an entity—a foreign company operating in Australia—to declare the value of their assets at the same value as they carry them on their books. This eliminates a practice of devaluing assets to declare a tax loss while still showing the asset at a higher value in their accounts. That could raise around about $120 million. Remember that figure. The second is online hotel reservations. This will require foreign companies operating an online booking service in Australia to treat the value of those bookings as subject to GST and to collect and remit the GST. That covers hotels, motels, hostels, student accommodation and caravan parks. The threshold is $75,000. It relates to where a booking service block-buys hotel rooms and then on-sells them through their website. There is now GST payable by the booking company on those block buys. It does not relate to where the website acts as an agent for the motel. In that case, the GST would be paid by the motel owner when the room is paid for. This raises next to nothing; there's no figure given, in fact. Let's look at the third one: luxury car tax. It sounds promising, doesn't it? When a luxury car is imported, the purchaser pays a luxury car import tax. If the purchaser has to send the car back for service or repair then, when it is reimported, they have to pay the tax again. The legislation did not distinguish between importation and reimportation. Now it does. This will cost money—slight, small. It's reasonable, but it's immeasurable. How is this about multinationals paying fair tax? It isn't.

One Nation has been raising and championing the need to raise multinationals' taxation, yet the government is now repeatedly, after many years, labelling bills as taxing multinationals. This is a pretence. Further, it speaks to the complexity of our tax system, which is the most destructive system in this country, in my opinion. This bill is putting lipstick on a pig. It is needed, but that's all it's doing. The ATO's then deputy commissioner, Jim Killaly, said in the 1990s—I think it was 1996—and in 2010 that 90 per cent of Australia's large companies are foreign owned and, since 1953, have paid little or no company tax.

People in Queensland are already waking up to the fact that, under Mr Morrison, the government is building facades. He's a great salesman, but he's building facades and then selling them. This is a pretence. Queenslanders are already saying that the MO of ScoMo is facade building. He has taken, it seems, a leaf out of former Premier Bob Carr's manual—how to do nothing yet appear to be doing something. There is a big disconnect between what we are being told by this government and what the government is doing. The government is saying one thing and doing the opposite. They're saying that this is about fair tax of multinationals—'multinationals pay their fair share of tax'—but this is not hitting the multinationals at all. We know the government is not collecting new revenue.

Is the government acting in good faith? That's the question that the people of Australia need to judge. Another question is: is the tax system fundamentally flawed? My answer is: both. We have got to the stage where we must do something different. So let's tax multinationals fairly. Let's be fair dinkum. They are not paying their fair share of tax, and the Australian Taxation Office lacks the ability to get them to pay a fair share of tax. Whether it's transfer pricing, or double taxation so they don't have to pay company tax here, or doing it outside the rules, the ATO hasn't the wherewithal to be able to chase this. It's time for a new paradigm. Let's tax multinationals properly.

One Nation raised the taxing of multinationals, and we raised the solution—as Senator Hanson has said—yet again. She called it transaction; I call it activity based tax. It doesn't matter. What it means is that we tax multinational companies on measured output that they sell. We raised this issue in the first place about multinationals and all the Labor and Liberal governments did was laugh. Now they pretend. So here is the solution: activity based taxation for multinationals and wholly owned subsidiaries, like Chevron Australia. Taxation on measurable activity—such as the volume of gas, for example, off the North West Shelf—cannot be avoided. The Europeans are now raising this. Each industry is different, so we have to tailor this to each industry.

But let's have a look at something that's not talked about much with foreign multinationals: credit card companies, like Visa, Mastercard and American Express. They have been operating here for decades, more than 30 years, yet have paid almost no tax. The average per month of interest-bearing debt that these credit companies hold is $30 billion. They charge credit card holders 15 to 24 per cent for that debt, and merchant fees of $5 billion per year. They have been here for more than 30 years yet have never made a profit—supposedly. They recognise income, yet seem to conjure up balancing expenses. And governments—Liberal and Labor—have known about this for 30 to 40 years. It is reasonable for a company to minimise tax, yet there is a reasonable expectation for companies to pay a fair share of tax, especially when they come down here and use our resources, our education system, our legal system and our infrastructure that the people are paying for and have paid for. It is only fair that the people get a return.

Why doesn't the government call in the CEOs of these credit card companies and tell them that, unless they pay a fair share of tax, we will remove their right to operate here in Australia? Why not change the rules or the laws? What about multinational pharmaceutical companies? What about gas companies that export gas to Japan and other countries? We are the world's biggest exporter of liquefied natural gas, yet we get hardly any revenue from it. As Senator Hanson quite correctly pointed out, the Japanese government gets about $3 billion in import duty from natural gas going into the country. We don't get anything like a billion. We're under a half a billion dollars. What about the large internet platforms—Amazon, Google, Facebook—that Senator Hanson mentioned? Let's get fair dinkum. Let's start telling the truth in this. The money raised by activity based taxes would cut personal tax, cut out debt, and provide for droughtproofing Australia and investment in infrastructure.

This speaks to the economic mismanagement of our country under Labor and Liberal. Wages are falling way behind the cost of living. Energy prices are ridiculous. We've got the world's biggest export of energy and yet we have the highest energy prices. We had the lowest prices for electricity just two decades ago; now we have the highest. The taxation system, water, infrastructure, water prices—we're in a massive drought, yet farmers cannot afford to pay for electricity to pump water so they don't plant fodder. This is about the productive capacity of this beautiful country. I'll talk in a minute about agricultural hits because that's what's really destroying the productive capacity. We have immigration that's far too high for our capacity at the moment. We need to pause on that. There are housing prices; infrastructure; lack of spending; family law crippling families; crippling workers; banks controlling; sovereignty being sold out to the UN and destroying our productive capacity; and economic mismanagement.

So I'd like to talk a bit about government inflicted disaster in agriculture. Property rights are fundamental to the productive capacity of this country. Under the UN's Kyoto protocol, the government, under Mr Howard as Prime Minister, stole the property rights of farmers and went around the Constitution and didn't pay compensation—all based on fraudulent claims from the UN, and no data. Water prices and water rights have been mismanaged as a result of the UN Rio declaration that Prime Minister Keating's government signed—again, no data. Energy prices are destroying our country now under the UN's Kyoto Protocol—again, no data. There is carbon farming under the UN's Kyoto Protocol and Rio de Janeiro declaration—again, no data. Soil and chemical run-off, even though there's no evidence for it, is the pretext for destroying farmers right across the eastern seaboard of Queensland—again, the product of the UN's Rio declaration. On fishing rights, we have the world's largest continental shelf fishing zone, yet we import three-quarters of the seafood we eat, as a result of the UN's Rio declaration—again, not based on data. Forestry is being shut down in Queensland because of the UN's Rio declaration—again, no data. Trigger mapping is being used by the Labor government in Queensland to abuse farmers and steal their rights. There is a grass-fed levies inquiry. There's a white paper into a red meat memorandum of understanding. These and many other things are destroying the productive capacity of our country, and the government has the hide to come in here and say 'making sure multinationals pay their fair share of tax'. That is a scam. It's just a facade.

Here's my question for the people. That's who we represent. That's who we serve. Why is the government coming up with these pathetic diversions and not governing Australia? Why is the government full of pretence? This is what happens when we have decades of Liberal-Labor government. As Senator Hanson said, One Nation has the policies that will provide the solution. We need a change from the Liberal-Labor duopoly.